The crying didn't stop when the front door opened. That was the first thing Thomas Hartley noticed. Standing in the entryway of his own house with his coat still on and snow melting on his shoulders.
In a normal home, a child who hears her father come home stops crying. She runs. She calls out. She collides with him at full speed and demands to be picked up. His daughter did none of those things. She just kept making that small, exhausted sound at the top of the stairs. The way a person cries when they've been crying so long they've forgotten anyone might come.
Thomas set his briefcase down very carefully, as if the sound of it hitting the floor might break something.
"Emma."
The crying stopped instantly. Not the way crying stops when a child is comforted; the way a sound stops when someone puts a hand over it.
He was three hours early. That detail mattered more than anything else that happened that year, though he wouldn't understand why until later. He had cut a meeting short in Chicago, caught a flight he hadn't told anyone about, and driven home through a February snowstorm because a man on the plane had asked him how old his kids were, and Thomas had hesitated.
He'd hesitated.
"Seven," he'd said finally, "and a baby. Eighteen months, I think."
I think. A father who had to guess.
He took the stairs two at a time. Emma was on the landing, on her hands and knees, trying to push a heavy oak chest back against the wall. Seven years old, and her shoulder was braced against a piece of furniture that two grown men had carried into that house.
"My back can't do it," she was whispering to nobody. "I'm trying. I'm trying."